The cat saw the pup was in trouble, knew it shouldn’t be down there, and decided to get him out. I frequently see cats doing things that may not benefit them directly but are caused by other motivations. In this case, the cat may have been driven by a parental instinct.

It could be, though I had a male cat who adopted a kitten and cared for it very kindly. He was neutered and had no pure behavioral reason for doing so, yet he did. She still does things he taught her to do.

I saw this comment on the Youtube video too. I think they may have filmed it instead of helping immediately because the puppy wasn’t near running water or any such thing, and not really in immediate danger, so they could always go save the pup if the cat didn’t help. It’s only a minute long video, after all.

It’s a dry ditch with a large drop that you can see & another large drop [the other side of the ditch] near to the camera. The kitten [or puppy] is not in danger since there’s no running water to fall into.

The camera person is on high ground the same as the cat – we are not shown how the kitten [or puppy] fell down there, but it makes sense to let the cat get on with the rescue & only get involved if it’s clear the kitten [or puppy] is beyond the cat’s help.

Cats are famously good mothers. I recall reading once, at an impressionable age, about female cats being kept on silver fox farms expressly to look after young foxes that were abandoned by their mothers–foxes apparently NOT being famously good mothers.

I assume that in the next scene the cat can be seen to be feasting on puppy?

Just kidding, of course. Great video. When I observe animals interacting with each other it always reminds me that we share so much of our behaviour in common. Another example: I recently spent some time in Monterrey Bay, CA observing sea-otters, and in particular the interactions between a mother and her baby. The mother would dive down, collect food and return to the surface and, if she didn’t immediately locate her baby, would get quite distressed and call out. The baby would then respond and both individuals would rush toward each other and the mother would relax again. My (somewhat obvious) conclusion: affectionate and protective tendencies of mothers towards their babies seems to be common between sea-otters and humans.

Cats can be very maternal. There were absolutely no predatory body signs anywhere – indeed the cat showed very much anxious parent type motions and behaviours prior to jumping down to the rescue. And it would have made more sense to kill the puppy when it was helpless at the bottom of the pit and eat it there where it was convenient and out of reach of other predators. There are plenty of vids linked to this one showing maternal cross species behaviour by and to cats for and from dogs. Presumably the cat has recently had kittens or else is missing a related companion.

As I recall, Professor Ceiling Cat is outstandingly good at including the word “cat” in the subject line of his cat postings, giving a most reasonable head’s up to anyone inclined to delete the email as a result of seeing the word “cat.”

Of course, it’s possible that one might find it too fatiguing to manually delete an email. Perhaps an app exists to automatically do that for one.